Stalin’s Ukrainians

Using previously classified Soviet archives, in this book I examine the Stalinist politics of memory in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Paying special attention to the portrayal of Russian-Ukrainian relations, I look at how the pre­revolutionary past of the USSR’s second largest nation was represented in scholarly works, political pronouncements, novels, plays, operas, paintings, monuments, and festivals during Stalin’s time Since only the major landmarks of pre-1917 Ukrainian history are considered, it is assumed that the protagonists - Stalinist ideologues, intellectuals, and general public - had no first-hand personal recollec­tions of Kievan Rus', the Cossack epoch, or the poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-61) Some individuals still alive in 1945 might actually have met the writer Lesia Ukrainka (d 1913) or the composer Mykola Lysenko (d 1912), but the vast majority of the population derived their images of these classical figures from later historical narratives In other words, this work is not concerned with contrasting historical memory and living collective memory of more recent events, but represents an attempt to uncover the mechanisms of (and glitches in) the institu­tionalization of official historical memory³²

Ukrainian history is particularly well suited for a study of imperial myth­making because it is intertwined so closely with Russian history Both Ukrainians and Russians are Eastern Slavic peoples with common origins and mutually comprehensible languages, both national histories claim medieval Kievan Rus' as their people’s first polity When in the seventeenth century the Ukrainian Cos­sacks under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky overthrew Polish dominion over their lands, they soon asked Muscovy for protection Although historical interpretations of the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty vary widely, its final result was Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia (with considerable, if decreasing autonomy during the first 120 years) While the western third of the Ukrainian ethnic lands remained under Polish, then Austro-Hungarian, and again Polish rule until 1939, Eastern Ukrainians experienced the process of modern nation-building within the Russian Empire The greatest national bard, Taras Shevchenko, became the em­bodiment of what the contemporary intelligentsia understood as the Ukrainian national revival ’ Following a brief interlude of independent statehood in 1918- 20, Eastern Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Bolshevik multinational state, subsequently in the form of the Ukrainian SSR In 1939 the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Poland and arranged for the Ukrainians reunification within their republic

In the seven chapters that follow, the book’s argument is developed with chronological and subject analysis of policies, texts, and images In chapters 1 and 2 the ideological evolution during the war years is discussed, and postwar ideologi­cal retrenchment is analysed in chapters 3 and 4 In the next three chapters I look, in turn, at the production of historical texts, codification of national heritage, and creation of artistic representations of the past during the late 1940s and early 1950s The epilogue carries the narrative to Stalin’s death and beyond, to the collapse of the USSR, thus tracing to its end the story of the Soviet historical memory

This book shows that, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the USSR accomplished the transition from an unqualified condemnation of tsarist colonial­ism to an increasing identification with the Russian imperial past, the Stalinist reinstatement of the nation’ as a subject of history resulted in the rehabilitation of both Imperial Russian and Ukrainian national patrimony Following signals from above, individual writers, historians, and filmmakers accomplished this change in public discourse, but not without an internal debate on the relative importance of ‘class’ and nation’ within the new Soviet historical memory When the tension between class and national narratives of Russian-Ukrainian relations was sup­pressed during the war, another contradiction surfaced, namely, between Russian and Ukrainnn patriotic national histones Before the Kremlin could issue any directives on this subject, the icpublic’s own ideologues and intellectuals were already reconciling Ukrainian historical mythology with the Russian grand narra­tive within a framework of a Russian-dominated ‘friendship of peoples *³³ In watching Moscow’s reaction, the republic’s intelligentsia soon came to understand that they could valorize Ukraine’s ‘Great Tradition’ as long as it complemented, but did not undermine, the story of the Russian imperial past

During the immediate post-war years Moscow was concerned with checking the growth of non-Russian national ideologies After initial confusion over either returning to a class vision or strengthening the imperial hierarchy of national pasts, the central authorities ultimately used the post-war ideological campaigns to denounce the Ukrainian national interpretation of the past However, the local elites were reluctant to follow the Kremlin’s call to reinstall class struggle as the core of historical narratives Instead, they soon worked out a revised and acceptable version of the Ukrainian national past that emphasized historical and ethnic ties to Russia As they were doing so, Ukrainian intellectuals also proved that they could successfully exploit the official idiom to defend themselves during ideological campaigns In the end, an uneasy symbiosis between ideologues and intellectuals revealed the entanglement of control, denunciation, and collaboration that al­lowed both parties to survive in the oppressive atmosphere of late Stalinism and produce ‘ideologically sound’ narratives of Russian-Ukrainian relations Yet both parties were painfully aware of their failure to fashion a Soviet Ukrainian historical memory completely separate from the nationalist myth of origins

In the final analysis, Soviet authorities never fully reconciled the Soviet peoples’ multiple national histories Although Ukrainian bureaucrats periodically sup­pressed ‘nationalist deviations’ in scholarship and culture through the late 1980s, their views on Ukrainian national memory remained deeply ambiguous With reified ethnicity as a principal category of Soviet political taxonomy, historical narratives of the post-war period remained in essence ‘national histories’ disguised by the superficial rhetoric of class and amalgamated into the imperial grand story Tracing the various nations’ historical trajectories as leading into the Russian 1 mpire and the Russian-dominated Soviet Union thus inescapably involved the constant affirmation of the peoples’ ethnic difference - at once a cornerstone of and a time bomb built into all imperial ideologies

In conclusion, I do not claim to have recovered the mentality of Ukrainians in Stalin’s time A collection of anecdotal evidence from the popular historical memory of the period does not allow for the comprehensive reconstruction of the actual collective memory Throughout the book, however, numerous indications l the vancd reception of official historical memory do suggest that the Stalinist collective memoiy icmained frustratingly ambiguous The production of official discourse on the past did not lend itself to total regimentation republic-level ideologues constantly adjusted the Kremlin’s guidelines to local realities, intellec­tuals often deviated from the prescribed course, and audiences could read differ­ently even the most impeccable cultural product Given the totalizing nature of the Stalinist project of memory, anything less than a unitary collective memory would have been considered a failure by contemporary ideologues And a failure it was far from being a coherent community of memory, the Stalinist Soviet Union remained a conglomerate of nations with loosely coordinated and internally unstable national memories

This book is based on the materials in eight Ukrainian and Russian archives ³⁴ Most of the documents became available to researchers only in the early 1990s Nevertheless, during the ‘pre-archival age,’ western scholars produced many insight­ful studies of Stalinism in Ukraine³⁵ and of Soviet attempts to redefine Ukrainian history to fit the evolving official vision of Russian-Ukrainian relations ³⁶

After ideological control over scholarship disintegrated at the beginning of the 1990s and declassification of the party archives began, a number of western scholars visited Ukrainian archives, subsequently producing several influential works that take Ukraine as a case study for their analysis of Stalinist political and social life ³⁷ Amir Weiner’s Making Sense of War is especially relevant for my argument about the role of indigenous intellectuals and bureaucrats While con­centrating on the war experience as a new centrepiece of the Soviet legitimizing myth, he also stresses that Ukrainian elites used the war narratives to articulate their ethnic difference Ukrainian historians also started studying the Stalinist period and, in particular, the relations between Stalinist authorities and the Ukrainian intelligentsia During the last decade, Ukrainian historians have pro­duced two helpful documentary collections,³⁸ as well as several books and numer ous articles relevant to my topic ³⁹ Unfortunately, most of these valuable studies subscribe to the traditional western view of Stalinism as a triumphant totalitarian dictatorship in which the state completely dominated society, and the focus is on the black deeds of Stalin and his envoys, who are presumed to have successfully terrorized the Ukrainian public into complying with the official party line

This work offers a different, more complicated picture of Stalinist ideology and culture in the most important non-Russian republic of the Soviet Union Further problematizing the traditional narratives of monolithic Stalinism, I attempt to reveal the subtle techniques of collaboration and resistance that defined the texture of Stalinist cultural life

Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish personalities and place names are transliterated according to their respective spellings in these three languages Exceptions have been made for places with common English forms, such as Moscow, the Kremlin, Kiev, Odessa, Sevastopol, Warsaw, and the Dnieper.